WumpusRat

I don't think there's an alternate for hurl. I mean, I'd love to grab a car and chuck it at someone, but eh! Plus it's a fairly long animation for a moderate-damage power. The reason I use boxing is to have a cheap attack that's always ready to go, and can finish off low-health mobs without burning a bigger attack. Boxing is basically a higher-damage version of jab, and has a better chance to stun. Especially since taking kick and cross punch increase the damage by 30%. So it's a decent filler attack, at least imo. Without hurl, there's only 4 single-target attacks in SS, and since I skipped jab, that only leaves 3. I'm debating moving the slots over to kick, but I like the faster animation that boxing has. So I'm not sure. And yeah, I really like how cross punch feels with the rest of the SS moves. You just haul back and punch a bunch of guys in an arc, which feels very super strength-y to me. Especially since it can knock them down, or occasionally send them flying. Definitely adds some much-needed aoe to my kit.

I use boxing on my SS/Will brute. I have it 4-slotted with kinetic combat for the smash/lethal defense bonus, and to boost cross punch's damage, since I don't like the hurl animation, so I went with cross punch instead. Two aoes is better than one.

I hope not. If you want all the fun little toys, you have to make sacrifices somewhere. You shouldn't be able to just have everything. Granting more powers, or more slots for vet levels would punish players who don't exclusively focus on one character. More options are just that, more options. Vet levels are a nice little bonus for continuing to play one character. What you're suggesting would change the actual "leveling process" from 1-50 to 1-XXX, since people would almost be forced to level up to whatever arbitrary vet level stopped giving slots and powers. You already have people complaining things aren't difficult enough. And this is just asking for characters to have even MORE power, and trivialize the content even further.

So why not make a clone of it? You could have Walk, which works the way it does now, and Combat Walk which just doesn't turn off powers. Because really, it WOULD be pretty fun to just slowly walk around blasting things. Or as a mastermind, walking through a massive firefight while your minions are killing stuff.

I'm pretty sure you can get 50th level versions of the lowbie sets on pineapple. I'll have to double-check when I'm home tonight to see if the values are the same as other 50th level sets, but I'm 99% sure that I've given myself like 50th level version of sets like steadfast protection, kinetic combat, etc.

I have boxing on my SS/Will brute 4-slotted with kinetic combat for the 3.75% smash/lethal def. Generally I use it as a filler attack to pop something that's at a sliver, rather than burning a longer cooldown/animation attack on them. And it does occasionally stun minions and lt's, which is nice. I'm not sure the whole point of the "fatigued" debuff is as it doesn't really seem to do anything (if you take cross punch).

I have a SS/WP brute I'm leveling up right now that I have a projected build for at 50th, and she does extremely well in the testing I've been doing. I don't have hasten though, so that might change things around a little bit. I'm also at work so I can't post it at the moment, but generally: 44% smash/lethal defense, 40% fire/cold defense, 30-35% to most everything else 83% smash/lethal resist, 30-40% vs everything else Rage is at a 123s recharge, so it only has a 3 second downtime window, mostly due to the changes they're making on test, where stacking it is automatic crash I didn't bother taking hurl either, instead picked up the entire fighting tree to try and get the most out of cross punch, to have another aoe attack, and it works quite well. With middling fury values it's hitting for 200-230. More if I have rage popped.

I had a storyarc that I wrote back on live that focused around a villain (or small group of villains) that traveled outside of Paragon City and ended up taking over a Central American country. Smashing the military, assassinating the leaders, and installing themselves as the local powers. The goal was eventually going to be to write the followup where they had to fend off a bunch of do-gooders who tried to come in and topple their "evil regime".

Nemesis created a giant stasis field device and was going to hold the world hostage, but made a tiny miscalculation and it ended up affecting him, too. So EVERYTHING was put into stasis, until a power outage caused the machine to blink off, and let everyone out. :)

I remember back on live there was Virtueverse, which was basically "the handbook to the Virtue universe", where people could post character bios and stuff. Is there one of those around for Homecoming/Everlasting? I've been working on a big writeup for my little group of aliens called "Meet the Minar", complete with pics and stuff. I was planning on posting it here when it's done, but was wondering if there was a site like Virtueverse around too. :)

I have a beam rifle / willpower sent that I built on the test server a while back, and it's extremely durable. I was able to plow through +2/6 malta without slowing down (as long as I didn't just let the sappers keep chain-draining me), and everything else is a cakewalk. Rise to the Challenge not scaling up with enemies makes it a bit weaker against huge groups, but stronger once the group thins out. And if you're hover-blasting, it provides a lot more regen than it would if it was the melee version which requires enemies to be close to you. <edit> This is without any incarnate stuff at all, just to point out. Not even the +1 level shift from the alpha. I usually test characters without any incarnate stuff up against malta, since they're the toughest non-incarnate group out there (though vanguard might be a bit rougher, but you can't do paper missions against them). I like to see how well I can handle malta first, then add some incarnate stuff and head over to DA to try some missions on +2/8 or +4/8.

Yeah, I've been toying around with some mastermind ideas on the test server lately, to see what I can do into incarnate stuff with them. The demon/time pretty much roflstomped through a +3/6 incarnate mission, so I think with a bit of tweaking of the build (most of them are just thrown together quickly to test out ideas) I could probably comfortably do +4/8. Though to maintain a better speed I'd probably just opt for +3/6. The extra +1/2 doesn't really make much all that much of a difference in terms of rewards, but it definitely slows down progress a bit.

On my demon/time mm I've been experimenting with she's got perma-hasten and perma-chrono boost, so sitting at about 200% recharge speed, plus a bit of recharge in the pet powers from various ATO pieces. Means if I summon a pet and it dies, I can replace it very quickly if necessary. I think the tier-1 pets can be resummoned every 17s or so.

I actually made a macro for that the other day, though it's only for base teleportation. It's for my alien crew, who can use their ship to transport themselves around the city. /macro SHIP "local Ship, one to transport.$$cce 7 cclightmagic$$enterbasefrompassword <password>" Costume slot 7 is just a copy of their primary costume, so you don't actually seem to change outfits mid-teleport. I had a friend watch me use it, and unless it lags a bit during teleport, the costume change animation starts, and about midway through it the character vanishes. Just like they were being beamed up. :)

I'd be up for that. Would be nice to have a number of other options, as well. A sword and shield, maybe, to be a necromantic knight. A staff so you can wave it around and throw energy bolts like a wizard. Energy, fire, lightning, cold, or other sorts of attacks. Even if it's just cosmetic.

Yeah, I remember fighting them for the first time way back when. Back when Arachnos and Longbow were considered kind of rough to deal with at times on higher difficulties, and Malta was the "ugh, no, not a Malta mission!" group. Then you run into Vanguard, and it's like every horrible thing the other groups have rolled into one. To paraphrase Family Guy, "You think you are tough, you think all is well. But kiss my green ass, I shall see you in hell."

No, this one was doing "The Vahzilok Pollutant Plot" flashback. First mission has you go into a huge office building and try to find a ton of hostages. I'm 99% certain I searched every possible corner of the building, but it's possible the hostage was tucked into a TINY corner somewhere in an office. Hence why I'd love it if hostages actually announced their presence. Seems dumb that they stay completely silent when there are heroes running around right nearby. Or villains, if they think the villain might be better than their current predicament.

I was doing a flashback to one of the lower-level arcs this morning, and ran into an issue that really frustrates the hell out of me. It's a mission where you have to go in and save 7 hostages. The problem is, it's in a massive 6-floor office building, with tons of little offices, nooks, and other places for the hostage to be "hiding", which requires you to carefully search every tiny nook and cranny of the entire building. After 30 minutes of slogging around and still being unable to find the last hostage, I gave up and aborted the mission (and the story arc). It wasn't worth the frustration. Can we please make it so that hostages have some sort of indicator of their presence like other objectives do? Make them ping, or give them the same noise that glowies have, or hell, just have them say "help me!" when a player gets near them. Because there are far too many times both solo and in groups where people are stumbling around going "where the hell is the last hostage?"

Exactly. That's why even silly little suggestions can sometimes make people look at something and see if maybe there is something so stupidly simply it'd work. Like adding a zero to the range, I sincerely doubt it's that simple. But, you never know!

I remember the original devs saying that REMOVING brawl kind of broke the pets, just like fiddling with recharge on them tended to goof with their AI. It does leave quite a few "what ifs", however, that we won't know without looking through it. I'm not saying just adding a zero the brawl range is the obvious and perfect fix, but given what the original devs would dig in their heels about sometimes, it could be that there IS a very simple fix for it, just not one that they were willing to do. For the 'ranged brawl 'example. they might have considered the pet just swinging at the air and hitting something 60 feet away an "absolutely not" solution, because they didn't want the pets to do that. It would be a kludge, to be sure, but it might work. But then again, there could be all sorts of nested what-ifs that cause the pets to have numerous issues no matter what you change. Without digging into the code, we just don't know.

Given that none of us know how the code actually works, speculating that "it wouldn't work, because it might have X" is kind of pointless. Sure, IF there are a bunch of other if/then's at work, then it might not be an easy fix. However, it might BE as simple as adding a zero to the range of the melee attacks. We won't know until one of the coders digs into it and takes a look. Hence the suggestion.

How about just changing the ranged pets so that their "melee" attack has the same range as their ranged attacks? All melee attacks have a "range" stat, so just adding a zero to that should be something the game would allow, shouldn't it? Sure, it might look a little silly to have a robot swing its arm and "slap" someone 70 ft away, but I think the vast majority of masterminds would be fine with their pets occasionally seeming to "twitch" instead of stupidly charging into melee like a drunken scrapper who forgot his toggles.

If it's only happened once, it may be that you were clicking on something else and the game registered the click elsewhere. I have that happen fairly often when I'm shift-moving objects up and down. Or it may simply be that you moved it at some point and forgot about it. I had that happen to me the other day as well, I moved some tables around, lowered the stuff on them, and came back later to find one object was hovering. I realized a few moments later that I couldn't remember having lowered that object to the table; I'd just forgotten to do so.

Well, I wouldn't say the ONLY thing. Inspirations can let you survive pretty well too. But yes, I would be quite displeased to lose bodyguard mode. I've survived way too many things I probably shouldn't have due to aggro juggling and being able to spread the damage out.

If you opt for the superior versions of the ATOs, you can get your pets up to +35% resist, +10% defense, and +15% aoe defense (which stacks with the other +10, so +25 total). If you have a set that offers +def or +res to your pets, you can generally softcap them pretty easily. They can still die if the enemy gets a lucky shot with a massive attack, but that's what the insta-kill protection would be for.